NITI Aayog in partnership with the government of Andhra Pradesh has created a dashboard for monitoring the real-time progress of the districts.

“We want to create competition at the state, district and even the block level.Bridging this 'distance to frontier' is key to ensuring the states' prosperity and the nation's progress", said Kant.

The NITI Aayog,
on Wednesday, launched the baseline ranking for 115 aspirational districts based on 49 indicators across five sectors that include health and nutrition, education, agriculture and water resources, financial inclusion and skill development, and basic infrastructure.

This would be followed by delta ranking of these districts from May 2018 based on their "incremental progress", NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said at the launch of the baseline ranking.

According to NITI Aayog, the dashboard developed for real-time data collection and monitoring will be open for public viewing from
April 1. “The dashboard will facilitate district collectors of all the aspirational districts to input the latest available data of their respective districts,” Kant said.

NITI Aayog in partnership with the government of Andhra Pradesh has created a dashboard for monitoring the real-time progress of the districts.

The Aayog had organised a workshop on March 23 to train representatives of the districts to familiarise them to the dashboard and its functioning, including data input, verification and presentation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched the ‘Transformation of Aspirational Districts’ programme in January to quickly and effectively transform some of the most underdeveloped districts of the country.

The broad contours of the programme include convergence (of central and state schemes), collaboration (of central, state level ‘Prabhari’ officers & district collectors), and competition among districts.

With states as the main drivers, this program will focus on the strength of each district, identify low-hanging fruits for immediate improvement, measure progress, and rank districts.

Under the programme, identified districts are prodded and encouraged to first catch-up with the best district within their state, and subsequently aspire to become one of the best in the country, by competing with, and learning from others.